I have setup this older Dell with Mint as a general web machine for a non-technical friend. It previously had XP and was just unusably slow. Mint has been great on it with the big exception of it will not do a shutdown.

At first I thought I had clicked "Restart" instead of "Shutdown" (from the Menu in the lower left corner), so I carefully made sure that I did click "Shutdown". Once again, no shutdown, but it restarts. No errors, no odd messages. It is just like I am clicking "Restart".

It is a great machine and Mint works very well on it, EXCEPT for the fact that it cannot shutdown! Any suggestions on how I could fix that? I hate to have to put XP back on their (both for my friend's sake and my own expense of time).

Thank you.

UPDATE -- I also tried booting from the Mint 14 64 bit cinnamon live dvd and tried to do a shutdown with it and had the same result as before (ie.. it restarted and did not shutdown). I have also tried to open a terminal and use "sudo shutdown +1" to do a shutdown from the command line, but had worse results. It does try to shutdown, and it looks like it shuts down, however the computer power button is still lit up, and I can see the backlight lit up on the display so I knew something was still powered on. After letting it sit for 5 min like that, I tried to move the mouse to wake it up with no luck. Pressing the power button also had no effect (I thought it might have been sleeping). I then held down the power button for 5 secs to power it off.

today just updated my system mint i m also facing same pblm after update linux mint 13 64 bit cinnamon not shutting down instead it restart and login screen appears along with session login default desktop and language ,plz help me out to shutdown even sudo poweroff not working via terminal using mint 13 around 2 months no pblm but after today software repos update the issue started,,,,,,,,,,,http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201105-8079/ its my laptop hardware certified by ubuntu look at it n help me solv the issue ............linux user for abot 3 yrs.........................

I'm having the same problem, the shutdown button just logs out but does not shut anything down, although for me sudo shutdown works but it's not an ideal solution, I really wish someone would chime in with some assistance. If there are 3 of us here with this problem then there are surly many more people that are having this same issue.

Linux 13 MATE 64-bit here. I have the same problem. Even when I press the power switch, the computer says it's shutting down and restarts instead!

EDIT: FWIW I tried an Ubuntu 12.04 live CD and had the same problem (older versions of linux mint don't have this problem when I boot from live CD). So we may have to look for Ubuntu fixes or workarounds to get this solved.

EDIT2: I've now tried several discs I had lying around. The experiement was, I would boot from live CD and immediately try to shut down without doing anything else to see if the computer would restart or not.

After some more googling I found some stuff on ubuntu sites that indicated "Wake on LAN" might be to blame. So I unplugged my wireless antenna before attempting a shutdown and it worked. I'm going to do some digging to see if I can find a better solution.

EDIT: Right-clicking the network connection in the taskbar before shutting down works too. I suggest everyone else in this thread try this workaround and report back.

Just to be clear the problem that I am having is that the shutdown button is causing the computer to "log out" of the desktop, at least for me the shutdown button has never "restarted" the computer.

I tested disconnecting my wireless connection and also tried turning off the wireless switch on my laptop, but at least for me this did not solve anything. Although during my testing of different desktops I discovered that Mint 14 MATE 64-bit is able to shutdown properly even when the wireless is connected, which is a different result from ChadMiller's test, so I'm not sure what is causing that discrepancy.

I know that windows 7 had a specific option to enable or disable WOL under the power options, but I'm not sure how to access these settings in Linux, at least in Cinnamon there is no WOL setting in the GUI.

EDIT: I just discovered that if I login with the username "mint" I am able to shutdown properly with no problems. If I login with my username the shutdown button will log me out but then I can choose the action to shutdown, which works properly. So at least for me this problem seems to have something to due with the user account setup or permissions. Although this is not really an ideal solution.

Last edited by BlackFox on Sun Dec 02, 2012 5:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Oh ok, that is something different from what I'm having. In my case, the computer appears to power all the way off...then restarts instead. Regardless of if I use the menu, or "sudo poweroff" in terminal or whatever. I think this is what happened to OP too. I actually installed "ethtool" in an attempt to disable WOL manually but it didn't work. I'm resorting to the "disable my network connection" workaround for the time being until I get bored or someone posts something in this thread that gives me another idea.

Yes, mine does not do a "log out" but a true "restart". I can tell Mint to "shutdown" from the menu, CLI, etc.. and then watch as the shutdown occurs, then BIOS screen appears, then the startup Mint login window/background appears.

Also on reading similar issues with other distros, I went through the BIOS looking for any type of wake on lan or non-normal power settings. However, this computer is so old it does not have any of those type settings in the BIOS for me to change. The closest thing was to alter the power state if the computer loses power: stay off, reboot, or return to existing setting. Default is stay off, so I left it there. No change as to whether the shutdown command works though... it still does a restart.

ChadMiller wrote:Can you shutdown if you disconnect from LAN first, or is that not possible?

I unplugged the ethernet cable and tried a shutdown. No luck. Still went into restart. As it restarted, I left the cable unplugged so it would never sense it in there in the first place. Let it boot and logged in, after i knew was fully up and going, I then told it to shutdown. Same thing.... just a restart. There is no other networking (no wifi, usb modem, etc...).

My computer shut down, waited 5 seconds and then started again by itself (strangely, only when running on the battery). Disabling laptop-mode-tools and laptop mode while on battery in /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf fixed the issue, although this isn't a real fix...

hello, found this topic with search. I have just installed Mint 14 Mate, and i am seeing the same issue. I click on shutdown, it restarts. Tried from my login, and from not logging in from MWM. Shutdown was clicked on.

Was there an answer found to the issue ?.

quick edit here, I am dual booting with Win7. After restart and loading Windows, then choosing shutdown. PC does shutdown.

Mint 14 cannot shutdown PC. It just restarts. If this were a BIOS issue, i think Windows would behave the same.

I just got a new pc. On my old now, it's still working fine. On ubuntu 10.04.

Doing some google on how Linux shuts down, seems a file in /sbin shutdown sends the command to shutdown PC. To late for me tonight, but tomorrow. I will create su user, rename /sbin shutdown to shutdown.bak, and in it's place put my shutdown from ubuntu 10.04, and see what happens. It's listed as a "shared library" file.

I have no idea if this will work, so if someone has already tried this, let me know. I think it should. It's a "shutdown" script. And for some of us, it's not working.

if hose the install. I'll start over. Just may switch to something LTS

Paul0320 wrote: if hose the install. I'll start over. Just may switch to something LTS

FYI, I get this same bug in LTS. Both Mint and Ubuntu. The "disconnect internet" first thing has been 100% reliable for me and this is a tower I rarely turn off so I've just been going with that. Would be interested if anyone else gets results though.